Singing in a chorus or choir is a time-honored way for a musician of average abilities to participate in a performance of a musical masterpiece, and music for massed voices has appeared in all periods of the classical tradition, from medieval Gregorian chant onward. Some music, written for chorus alone, is known as <em>a cappella</em> music ("music for the chapel"), and the unaccompanied church choir was the medium for some of the most intricate musical masterpieces of the Renaissance era, including those by Josquin Desprez. (read more)

Singing in a chorus or choir is a time-honored way for a musician of average abilities to participate in a performance of a musical masterpiece, and music for massed voices has appeared in all periods of the classical tradition, from medieval Gregorian chant onward. Some music, written for chorus alone, is known as <em>a cappella</em> music ("music for the chapel"), and the unaccompanied church choir was the medium for some of the most intricate musical masterpieces of the Renaissance era, including those by Josquin Desprez. The grand combination of chorus and orchestra has produced beloved works such as Handel's Messiah and a long tradition of festive choral pieces that followed. The German Requiem mass by Brahms is another example of a work that has taken on a public function and won a place in the hearts of listeners who might otherwise encounter classical music only rarely. The link between choral music and the church is strong but not thoroughgoing; Haydn, an excellent choral composer, wrote an oratorio called The Seasons (1801) that was based on pastoral poetry. In an oratorio, soloists take the roles of characters in a loosely constructed story while the chorus adds detail and responds to the action. The oratorio is not staged like an opera, but oratorios, even sacred ones like Messiah, have been heavily influenced by opera. The same is true even of purely sacred works such as Bach's church cantatas, where religious fervor is often expressed in the vocal styles of Italian opera of the day. Though the dimensions of choral pieces are generally large, the clean sound of an unaccomanpied choir continued to attract composers from the eighteenth century onward. Mozart's motet Ave verum corpus is a choral miniature at once dense and profoundly serene, and even the gargantuan-thinking late nineteenth-century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner penned small unaccompanied choral pieces like Os justi. Choral music has a ready-made market in the many choirs that dot the landscape of every Western country, and it has retained its general popularity even as other classical genres have suffered. Stravinsky was a twentieth-century composer who favored the chorus with both the Dionysian wedding piece Les noces and the coolly Neo-Classical Symphony of Psalms. An entire sacred branch of the recent minimalist movement, sometimes dubbed "holy minimalism," is centered on choral works by such composers as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, who use choral sonorities in a mystical way. Crowd-pleasing choral works by the likes of Britain's John Rutter compete with crossover albums atop the classical bestseller lists.(collapse)